I had a conversation the other day with an infrastructure manager at my client. We eventually started talking about cloud computing. As he is about to embark upon a significant platform upgrade, I queried him as to whether his team had looked at maybe leveraging an external provider for the new version of the platform, i.e., provisioning this enterprise capability over the internet. I fully anticipated a negative response based on custom business requirements, data security, etc. Instead, I heard "we can do it cheaper". Given today's answer, that seemed quite reasonable.
My follow-up question, knowing full well the list price per user/month that these outside providers charged, was "how much does it cost us to provide this platform and service?" Astounded was I that his tepid reply was "I don't know." How in the world did they do a rational and reasoned assessment of the external provider alternative without knowing the true internal costs?
Things like that boil my blood. Yes, I know it's only a client's money that is being potentially wasted but I'm pretty sure this kind of irrational thinking extends into other areas of the IT organization. There are numerous factors that lead to this kind of behavior, not least among them being a sense of 'job insecurity' in an atmosphere of pervasive layoffs, but this is surely one way of working that is counterproductive.
Anyway, I'm not really sure what I'll do with this blog. For now, I'll treat this one as a platform for writing exercise related to work.
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